NGINX is the only webserver to show consistent growth in Netcraft’s top 1million site report, up almost 1.5% in the last 2 months. Microsoft has remained steady; Google and Apache’s share of this segment has dropped:

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Netcraft Top Million busiest Sites, June 2014​

Netcraft survey a larger corpus of ‘active sites’, and again over the last 2 months, NGINX’s share is up over 0.5% (more than any other major web server). Netcraft’s active sites report tries to exclude duplicate, templated sites such as link farms and parked domains, instead only counting websites with a distinctive structure indicating unique content.

In Netcraft’s headline ‘total sites’ figure, Netcraft reported a drop of 3.5m websites for NGINX in May, and a further 8.6m in June. In May, Netcraft gave the following commentary:

“the losses were mostly isolated to just a few hosting companies…. two million nginx sites disappeared at cloud hosting company Enzu, …1.2 million at BurstNet.
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Changes by mass hosting providers are motivated by many reasons – partnerships, moving to a more cost-effective location, domain transfers between subsidiaries – they certainly don’t point to a large-scale migration of users away from Nginx.

W3Techs, June 2014

W3Techs have a different sampling methodology. They begin with the top 10 million websites, based on Alexa Traffic Rank, and drill down to the busiest 1,000. Since April, they also have observed a significant shift in favor of NGINX – the number of websites in their top 10,000 and 1,000 using NGINX has gone up almost a percentage-point in the last 60 days:

However, previous trends has shown that this is not a one-off. There’s a continual migration towards NGINX, perhaps because of its ability to deliver better performance, reliability and consistency from existing infrastructure as well as new. The new commercial operations help too – they underwrite the future of the open source product.